tend: no-op agent sessions on bot-authored PRs (mention on deploy-bot comments + self-review)

[dormouse-bot]

Summary

tend runs full agent sessions for events on the bot's own PRs that can never produce an action, costing ~$1 per nightly regen PR. Both cases live in upstream-owned generated workflows (.github/workflows/tend-*.yaml, "Do not edit this file directly"), so this issue asks whether to escalate the fix to max-sixty/tend rather than patching locally.

Surfaced by the review-runs sweep (run 26356611825) while analyzing the cluster of runs around PR #93.

Case 1 — tend-mention fires on automated bot comments (doubled by created+edited)

PR #93 was authored by dormouse-bot. The tend-mention verify gate short-circuits to should_run=true for any comment on a bot-authored PR — it never inspects the comment author. So the cloudflare-workers-and-pages[bot] deploy notification (comment 4527716896, author type Bot) spun up a full agent session. Worse, that bot edits its comment to update deploy status, so with issue_comment: [created, edited] two sessions fired for one comment:

Run	Trigger	Comment timestamp	Outcome	Cost
26355149816	created	created 07:27:53	exited silently	$0.22
26355164490	edited	updated 07:28:45	exited silently	$0.23

Both runs behaved correctly — they identified the comment as an undirected deploy notification and exited without posting. The session simply never needed to start. This recurs on every nightly regen PR, since each gets a created+edited Cloudflare deploy comment.

Proposed upstream fix: in the verify job, before the PR_AUTHOR == "$BOT_NAME" short-circuit, skip issue_comment events whose comment author is a Bot (github.event.comment.user.type == 'Bot') and whose body does not contain @dormouse-bot. The existing @dormouse-bot-mention check already runs first, so legitimate bot summons are preserved.

Case 2 — tend-review no-op self-review of bot-authored PRs

tend-review fires on the bot's own PRs (run 26355149220 on #93, $0.55), reads the full diff, then discovers self-approval isn't allowed and exits without a review. Same pattern was recorded for #88–90 in the prior sweep (run 26328198983) — 4 occurrences now. Behaviorally correct, but it reads ~460K cache tokens before the self-approval guard short-circuits.

Proposed upstream fix: short-circuit on PR_AUTHOR == BOT_LOGIN before reading the diff (or gate the tend-review workflow to skip bot-authored PRs).

Ask

These are upstream-owned generated files — no clean local override exists. Should I open the corresponding issue(s) at max-sixty/tend? The combined waste is modest (~$1/nightly-PR) but fully avoidable and structural.

[nedtwigg]

yeah, open on upstream max-sixty/tend, but make sure there's no duplicate issue first

[dormouse-bot]

Checked max-sixty/tend for duplicates first — none found. The nearest matches (#166 "Allow tend-mention to trigger on bot's own reviews", #177 / #564 about applying fixes to bot-authored PRs) address different problems, so I filed two new issues, one per root cause since they live in different workflows:

• Case 1 → max-sixty/tend#606 — tend-mention no-op sessions on undirected bot comments (Cloudflare deploy notifications), doubled by created+edited.
• Case 2 → max-sixty/tend#607 — tend-review no-op self-review of bot-authored PRs reading the diff before the self-approval guard.

Each links back to this issue for context.